According to the 2026 FTTH/B Market Panorama, produced by IDATE for Fibre Council Europe (formerly FTTH Council Europe), full-fiber networks now pass 295 million homes across the 39 countries tracked, or 79.3% of households. Yet only 160 million of those homes pay for a fiber subscription. In the EU27 plus the UK, 86 million homes have fiber at the door and choose not to use it. That is 45% of everything built.
This is the most expensive gap in European telecoms. Every home passed that doesn't subscribe is capital spent with no revenue to back it up. IDATE's own conclusion is blunt: the market has moved from coverage expansion to monetization, and adoption is now the main challenge.
It is also the gap that brings us to Amsterdam. From April 6 to 8, 2027, Maravedis and HanseCom will host RISER, the European Summit for Residential MDU Connectivity and PropTech, endorsed by Fibre Council Europe. Much of Europe's unsold fiber sits in apartment buildings, and RISER is built around the people who decide what happens inside them.
The numbers: a 70-point spread between leaders and laggards
Europe's average take-up rate — subscribers as a share of homes passed — reached 54.4% across the EU39 in September 2025. That is up just 2.0 points in a year, while coverage rose 6.2 points over the same period. Networks are still being built faster than they are being sold.
The average hides two very different Europes. Spain converts 93% of passed homes and France 89%. Germany converts 25% and Austria 23%. Belgium, Italy, Greece and Croatia all sit near or below 30%.
The unsold capacity is concentrated in a handful of large markets. Of the 86 million passed-but-unsubscribed homes in the EU27 plus the UK, Germany accounts for 18.7 million, Italy 15.8 million, the UK 12.7 million, and Poland 8.0 million. Those four countries hold roughly 64% of Europe's idle fiber.
The outlook is more encouraging. IDATE forecasts that EU27+UK fiber penetration will climb from 42% today to 79% by 2031, with coverage reaching 92%. Getting there means signing up roughly 91 million additional households in six years, and most of them live in exactly the markets where take-up has stalled.
Why Europeans are not switching
The Market Panorama points to one dominant cause: competition from "good enough" platforms. Where VDSL is still live, as in Germany and the UK, or where cable modem service is strong, as in Portugal and parts of Eastern Europe, fiber struggles to win households that already get 100 Mbps or more. Italy faces the same dynamic, with penetration of just 22%.
From Maravedis's own fieldwork, four further frictions compound the problem:
- No felt need. Most households cannot tell the difference between 250 Mbps and 1 Gbps on a weekday evening. Fiber is sold on speed, but the pain residents actually feel is usually Wi-Fi coverage inside the home.
- Price and bundling. In many markets, fiber carries a premium or arrives bundled with TV and mobile services the household does not want. Aggressive fiber-only, no-frills offers in France and Spain have helped lift take-up.
- Switching friction. An installation appointment, a technician inside the flat, and drilling through walls are real barriers. In rented apartments, the tenant often needs the landlord's consent first.
- Who does the selling? Wholesale-only operators now own more than half of FTTH homes passed in Sweden, Italy and the UK. Open access is excellent for rollout economics, but it leaves demand generation in the hands of retail ISPs whose incentives do not always favor migration.
The common thread is that the network reaches the building, but the commercial case stops at the front door. That is precisely the boundary RISER is designed to cross, by putting operators and the owners of residential buildings in the same room.
The problem lives in the riser
Apartment buildings should be fiber's easiest win. IDATE notes that markets in Eastern Europe, where much of the population lives in large multi-dwelling units (MDUs), have found fiber economics comparatively easy. One connection to the building serves dozens of households. Yet density alone does not guarantee adoption.
In Maravedis's earlier analysis, Stuck in the Basement, we found that about 54% of German households and 54% of Austrian households live in buildings with three or more dwellings. Both countries still convert only around a quarter of passed homes. Spain, with roughly 70% of households in MDUs, converts 93%. The difference is what happens between the basement and the apartment door.
In many stalled markets, fiber is counted as "passed" when it reaches the street or the building entry. The vertical run through the riser to each unit still has to be negotiated, permitted, and paid for. Building owners, housing associations and property managers control that last stretch, and they are rarely part of the fiber conversation.
Germany shows how much in-building rules matter. For decades, cable TV costs were folded into tenants' service charges, which locked in coax as the default in-building network. That ancillary cost privilege ended in mid-2024, opening millions of rental units to new building-wide contracts. Whether those contracts go to fiber, and on what terms, is an open commercial question. This is the conversation RISER exists to have.
What actually moves take-up
The evidence points to four levers, and only one of them is about the network itself.
1. Copper switch-off. IDATE calls it the simplest and most effective lever, and Spain is the proof: once VDSL disappears, fiber has no low-cost rival. The European Commission's proposed Digital Networks Act would require national copper transition plans by 2029 and a phase-out between 2030 and 2035. A decade is a long time to leave VDSL competing with fiber in Germany and Italy.
2. In-building access rules. The Gigabit Infrastructure Act requires new and majorly renovated buildings to be equipped for high-speed networks. That helps the next generation of buildings, but most of Europe's unsold fiber sits in existing housing stock, where access still depends on owner consent and negotiation.
3. Simpler offers. Fiber-only products at sharp prices, as seen in France and Spain, remove the bundling barrier. Higher speed tiers on XGS-PON give operators room to grow revenue once the customer is on fiber.
4. Building-level models. In North America, managed and bulk connectivity agreements let a building owner contract once for every unit, so fiber and managed Wi-Fi are live on move-in day. Europe has its own versions, from German housing-association contracts to Nordic building-wide deals, but they remain fragmented and little understood across borders.
The fourth lever is the least discussed in European policy circles and the one with the most room to grow. It is also the core of the RISER program, which covers in-building fiber and Wi-Fi, managed connectivity models, and the regulatory forces reshaping the sector.
Join us at RISER
RISER takes place in Amsterdam on April 6 to 8, 2027. It is produced by Maravedis in partnership with HanseCom Media & Communication, and endorsed by Fibre Council Europe. The format is built for decisions, not booth traffic. Day one is a hands-on workshop day; April 7 and 8 bring two days of keynotes, panels, and roundtables for around 300 selected participants. Property owners attend as guests of the event.
We are building the agenda now and want practitioners with evidence, not slogans — housing associations, institutional owners, operators with MDU take-up numbers, regulators working on copper switch-off and the Gigabit Infrastructure Act, and vendors solving the last meters.
Europe has spent two decades and many billions passing 295 million homes with fiber. The next chapter is about getting people to use it. We hope you will help write it with us in Amsterdam.
Sources
- IDATE for FTTH Council Europe, European FTTH/B Market Panorama 2026, data as of September 2025
- Fibre Council Europe, FTTH/B Market Panorama 2026: Deployment Trends, Take Up Dynamics and Key Insights (webinar)
- optics.org, Fiber networks now pass 295 million homes across Europe, March 17, 2026
- Fibre Council Europe, FTTH Council Europe is now Fibre Council Europe, July 29, 2026
- European Parliament Legislative Observatory, Digital Networks Act, 2026/0013(COD), January 21, 2026